Installation

Installing locally vs. system-wide

If you are your computer’s administrator, you probably want to
install schoolutils system-wide. In that case, you need to run the
pip or python installation commands below with administrator
privileges. On Mac OS X and GNU/Linux, you can generally do that by
prefixing sudo to these commands (e.g., sudo pip install
schoolutils).

If you do not have adminstrative access to the computer where you want
to install schoolutils, or you simply don’t want to install it
system-wide, there are a couple of options for installing it locally.
The first is to install schoolutils in a Python virtual environment that you control. To do
this, create and activate a virtual environment, then run the pip
command below. The second is to install schoolutils to a directory in
your control which is on the system Python interpreter’s path. You
can do that by passing the --user option to the python command
below (python setup.py install --user).

Note that if you don’t install schoolutils system-wide, you may need
to adjust your shell’s $PATH environment variable to make the
grade command available. A virtual environment makes this easy,
so that is the recommended method for installing locally.

schoolutils has no dependencies (besides the Python standard library),
so the installation should go smoothly; if you have any problems, please
report a bug.

Configuration

It isn’t necessary to configure schoolutils, but it will be faster to
use if you do. The command-line interface expects to find configuration
files in the .schoolutils directory of your home directory. You
should create three Python modules there: config.py,
calculators.py, and validators.py. Sample configuration files
are included in the examples directory of the source package:

The comments in the sample files explain the values you should provide
there. The most important one in config.py is gradedb_file,
which should contain the path to your grade database file. If you
don’t provide this value, you will have to type it in every time you
start the grading program.

First run

Once you’ve installed the package, you can run the grading program as
follows:

$ grade

This will start the grading program’s interactive user interface with
the configuration you specified in your config.py module.
From there, you can:

Add a course

Add or import students into the course

Add assignments

Start entering grades

After that

A few concepts

The grading program has a few important concepts you should be aware
of:

Currently selected course and assignment

The grading program has a notion of the ‘current course’ and
‘current assignment’. Most of the actions you take in the grading
program depend on your having previously selected a course or
assignment. For example, when you add or import students, the
grading program will add them as members of the current course.
When you enter grades, you will be entering grades for the current
assignment. You can specify the current course and assignment in
your config.py module, or select them interactively.

Entered vs. calculated grades

‘Entered’ grades are grades you have entered into the database
through the interactive interface. These are the sort of grades you
produce by hand: for example, letter grades for a batch of papers
that you’ve graded.

‘Calculated’ grades are grades you use the grading program to
calculate. Grades are calculated by a Python function that you must
provide, in your calculators.py module (see below). These will
also be saved in the database, when you run the grade calculation
command.

You can use the grading program without ever calculating grades, but
it will (hopefully!) save you some work if you do.

Grade calculation function

A grade calculation function is a function you define in your
calculators.py module. This function should calculate the
calculated grades for a single student on the basis of entered
grades. You should define one grade calculation function per
course.

Grade calculation functions use a special naming convention so the
grading program knows which function to use when calculating
grades. The name should be:

calculate_grade_<course number>_<semester><year>

For example, if you are teaching a course numbered ‘12A’ in the fall
semester of 2013, you’d write a grade calculation function named:

calculate_grade_12A_fall2013

Each grade calculation function will receive a set of database rows
as input, representing a single student’s grades in the current
course. The function should return a dictionary or list of
dictionaries representing grades calculated for that student. For
more information, see the example calculators.py module.

Validator function

A validator function is a function you define in your
validators.py module. It prepares data that you type into the
user interface to be saved to the database. This function should
accept a string and either return an appropriate value or raise a
Python ValueError. If a validator raises a ValueError, the
user interface asks you to re-enter the value until you type one
that validates. For example, the letter_grade validator ensures
that any string passed to it is a letter grade, so that you can’t
save a letter grade of ‘W’ by mistake.

schoolutils provides sensible defaults for all validator functions,
so defining your own is not strictly necessary. But you can reduce
data-entry errors by providing custom validator functions, which
will override the defaults. See the sample validators.py
module for more information and a list of the validators for which
you can provide custom definitions.

Command-line options

To see command-line options available for the grading program, use:

$ grade --help

Warning

schoolutils is alpha-quality software. It is offered in the hope you
find it useful, but (like all software) it has bugs, so please take
sensible precautions to protect your data. In particular, you should
backup your grade database file(s) regularly! This is easy, because
SQLite stores your whole grade database as a single flat file, so just
do it!

As with all Free software, schoolutils has no warranty. Please see
the warranty notice in the license file or the individual source files
for more information.